


Musings of a Madman: "My Struggle" I & II

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [41]
Category: X Files
Genre: Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, my struggle i & ii, season 10 episode 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-26
Updated: 2016-02-26
Packaged: 2018-05-23 10:04:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6113104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tad O’Malley is the terminal symptom of something that was a longstanding problem with Chris Carter’s writing of show mythology. And behind the cut tag, I will talk about why he should actually be the poster child for everything that is wrong with this revival.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Musings of a Madman: "My Struggle" I & II

We always worry about the wrong things. When news was leaked that Joel McHale had been cast as a right-wing conspiracy theorist named Tad O’Malley, there was widespread dismay about the possibility of his being a love interest for the now-single Scully. All is lost, we said. Tad will come between Mulder and Scully, we said. He will ruin the revival, we said.

Well, as it turns out, the ‘love interest’ angle, while certainly hinted at in “My Struggle I,” went nowhere fast. And yet one could say that Tad O’Malley did in fact ruin the revival, or at least ruin the parts of it that he touched. I mean look at this still from “My Struggle II.” Three of the main characters in this episode are on screen together. A global pandemic is galloping apace. Mulder is missing presumed deathly ill. The clock is ticking. And what are they all doing? They’re watching “Truth Squad with Tad O’Malley.”

Both parts of “My Struggle” are terminally compromised by basic writing mistakes; and Tad O’Malley is one of the biggest. Huge chunks of both episodes were dedicated to Tad O’Malley monologuing. No harm to Joel McHale, who did a good job with the crap he was handed; but anyone, you would think, could see that most X-Files fans would really rather watch Mulder and/or Scully do ANYTHING than watch Tad O’Malley spew out his conspiracy bullshit. And yet. 

Tad O’Malley is the terminal symptom of something that was a longstanding problem with Chris Carter’s writing of show mythology. And behind the cut tag, I will talk about why he should actually be the poster child for everything that is wrong with this revival.

The further I got with my X-Files rewatch the more frustrated I became with Carter’s dependence on the informant as a plot engine. Mulder never uncovers anything about the conspiracy on his own. He’s always following up on leads provided to him by shadowy government sources; and–and this used to drive me CRAZY–he would believe ANYTHING that ANY of them told him, even if they had lied to him outrageously many times before. 

Initially it was entertaining enough, because the informants themselves were interesting to watch. When Mulder was meeting Deep Throat in darkened parking garages in season 1, it was pleasantly atmospheric and mysterious. Mr. X always brought a charge to his episodes; instead of just telling Mulder stuff he would get involved in the action, often on the wrong side. X added dramatic value wherever he went–to “One Breath,” especially to “Nisei/731,” even to the confusing and inconclusive “Herrenvolk.”[Kovarrubias](http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/124155250769/women-of-the-x-files-marita-kovarrubias) brought a bit of Bond girl glamor into the mix. Krycek, well, he was an inveterate liar and more of an adversary than an informer and eventually we all sort of mentally changed his last name to Ex Machina; but ever since “Ascension,” he and Mulder had their own dark chemistry, a spark and sizzle that served as a piquant sauce for the Mulder/Scully relationship. Even Martin Landau in _Fight the Future_ was sort of endearing, with his huge eyebrows

But all of that was camouflaging something that “My Struggle” makes baldly and pathetically obvious, which is that Chris Carter knew no other way of introducing information about the conspiracy. Eventually I got tired of watching Mulder be led around by the nose by Cancer Man and Kritschgau. I got even more pissed off when this started to colonize Scully’s part of the show, as for instance in “En Ami,” which may not be technically the worst episode they ever made but is definitely up there in terms of episodes that I viscerally hated, and in the infuriating “TrustNo1.” What was even worse is that the longer the mythology arc went on, the more time Chris Carter felt he had to spend summarizing it for the viewers. Kritschgau’s bullshit occupies far too much of “Gethsemane” and “Redux I.” There’s a fairly large chunk of “Two Fathers/One Son” which is nothing but Cancer Man explaining the Mythology So Far to Diana Fowley, who then has to go off and explain to Mulder, who then has to explain it to Scully, who finally says fuck explaining and let’s go DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. “The Truth,” which we all thought was going to be the end of the X-Files at the time, is for most of its running time literally nothing but Mulder summoning a series of informants to the witness stand to help him lay out a summary of the mythology that actually takes up more space in that episode than the action.

“My Struggle I” makes this problem worse by introducing a NEW mythology plot, which causes Tad O’Malley to barf up large chunks of exposition. It doesn’t help that Tad’s big monologue is going a mile a minute, as if Joel McHale is trying, poor man, not to take up any more screen time with this bullshit than he has to. In “My Struggle II,” it metastasizes; I didn’t time it but I would bet that we spend at least 15 minutes of a 45 minute episode watching some version of the Tad O’Malley show. For your season finale–for what may, for all you know, be the last X-File you ever get to produce–to spend 1/3 of it making us watch a character we never cared about, from whom we haven’t heard since Episode 1, and who has been given none of the personality quirks that made Mr. X and Krycek and Kovarrubias entertaining to watch, is just unforgivable. No other showrunner would do that. No other showrunner would ALLOW one of his writers to do that.

There’s only one thing that explains that: Chris Carter cares more about spouting his own crackpot conspiracy theories than he does about the show. He cares less about making a good episode of television, or giving his characters a good sendoff, than he does about broadcasting his Vision into the void. Tad O’Malley, my friend, is the product of Chris Carter’s world-class arrogance, solid gold stupidity, and platinum-plated narcississm. 

It’s even worse because it is now much clearer than it ever was before that Chris Carter has lost his mind.

I started using that tag as a joke; but by God, on the evidence of “My Struggle,” it’s absolutely true. “My Struggle I” made it clear that Chris Carter no longer discriminates–if he ever did– when it comes to conspiracy theories. He will give credit to anything that fits his paranoid view of the world. Tad O’Malley’s conspiracy rant includes, for instance, a reference to FEMA building prison camps. We last heard from FEMA in _Fight the Future,_ where Martin Landau’s character tells Mulder that FEMA is the Big Bad organizing to take over once the alien colonization begins. This is the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It is supposed to help out after hurricanes, tornadoes, etc., and for most of its life that’s all it’s ever done. It emerged into the limelight only under George W. Bush’s reign, when it became clear shortly after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans that Bush had appointed a FEMA directoer who could not find his ass with both hands and a flashlight. FEMA certainly failed catastrophically during that disaster; but that wasn’t because of a conspiracy, that was just good old incompetence, callousness, greed, and neglect. FEMA is plausible as a secret black-ops mission *only* to right-wing extremists who believe that the federal government, like taxes, is a conspiracy by liberals to deprive them of their God-given freedoms. It is true that the far left and the far right do sometimes converge on the question of big government, though they arrive at their shared conspiracy theories from different directions. “9/11 was a false flag operation” is a perfect example. But making Tad O’Malley the new whistleblowing hero validated the bullshit that right-wing conspiracy theorists like Glenn Beck have been peddling ever since Obama got elected. 

I thought this was irresponsible in “My Struggle I,” where Tad O’Malley spent a LOT of time talking about how part of this takeover plan was for the federal government to seize everyone’s guns. It becomes a thousand times more irresponsible in “My Struggle II,” which validates anti-vaccine paranoia far more aggressively than the first nine seasons ever did. It was, quite frankly, never really clear how smallpox vaccination fit into the mythology, apart from the fact that it was responsible for Krycek losing his arm. There were vague suggestions that it had been used to catalogue people, or to mark them with something that would make them vulnerable to the aliens or the conspirators in some way. But I don’t recall any suggestion that vaccination _itself_ was dangerous. “My Struggle II” shows vaccines actually killing people. The first patient we see has a lesion at the injection site. Surely since he got the vaccine, the virus has spread through his whole bloodstream? Maybe; but the point is to mark the vaccination itself as the source of the evil. 

Even worse, in Tad’s conversation with the doctor he has on the show, he describes the pandemic as “a fast-moving AIDS without HIV.” THAT move actually revives the hysterical contagion paranoia of the early AIDS epidemic, and gives it new life by fusing it with contemporary paranoia about vaccines. Back in the day, before people really knew how HIV was spread, gay men were subjected to outrageous discrimination and mistreatment because of the fear that ANY contact with any gay man could be a death sentence. All of that was debunked; HIV cannot in fact be transmitted through casual contact nor can it become airborne; and here’s Chris Carter reviving that bullshit AGAIN by giving us a pandemic that spreads like avian flu but behaves like AIDS. DID WE NEED THIS? DID WE FUCKING NEED TO REBOOT AIDS PARANOIA? NO WE DID NOT. 

When I posted my frustration with the conspiracy stuff in “My Struggle I,” violethuntress responded with characteristic thoughtfulness and insight, arguing that in fact there are some positives to the new mythology, and suggesting that Tad O’Malley would turn out in the end to be only partly right. I hoped she was right. Alas, “My Struggle II” not only does not debunk Tad, it makes Tad a hero and martyr. It makes Tad, in fact, our Last Hope. It vindicates him and all of his irresponsible bullshit. It turns, not just the Tad O’Malley show, but the X-Files itself, into a fulfillment of the prophecies of right-wing lunatics.

Tad, in fact, functions in this episode AS a prophet, which–MOST infuriatingly–turns Scully into his disciple. Most of her early interactions with Einstein aren’t even real conversations;  Scully simply preaches the Gospel of Tad and Einstein initially resists it and then is converted to it. Part of how you make a pandemic plot work is by gradually ratcheting up the tension, having the contagion spread slowly at first and then rapidly, showing the doctors transition from “hm, that’s odd” to “this is definitely concerning” to “HOLY SHIT NOBODY’S GONNA SLEEP TILL WE FIX THIS.” Well, that doesn’t happen in “My Struggle II,” because as soon as Scully sees the first case she recognizes it as the breaking of the first seal and starts prophesying the end of the world. So Tad ruins parts of the episode that he’s not even in.

But of course it’s not really Tad’s fault. You can see the problem that created Tad everywhere in “My Struggle II.” If Tad’s the prophet, then Cancer Man is God the Father; and Cancer Man’s revelations just make no sense at all. He’s destroying humanity because they’re making the planet uninhabitable for humans? So he’s moved heaven and earth to achieve a result he believed was inevitable to start with? What the fuck sense does this…oh, wait. Wait. Didn’t Tad say something in “My Struggle I” about how global warming was a secret conspiracy? And although logically that is totally inconsistent with what Cancer Man is saying now, are we not seeing, once again, Chris Carter validate climate change denial by perversely turning the Ultimate Evil into a radical environmentalist, whose attempts to stop climate change are far more catastrophic than climate change itself? DID WE NEED THAT, CHRIS? DID WE NEED TO VALIDATE CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL? NO WE DID NOT.

And what happened to Monica is part of this too. I was not personally too attached to Monica. I can imagine that if I had been, I’d be pretty pissed off. I’ve seen a lot of people arguing that she would never agree to be Cancer Man’s little chickadee just to save her own life. But don’t you see, I say when I read all this, don’t you see what happened here? Chris Carter had something about the conspiracy that he needed Scully to know. She can’t learn it on her own through sciencing, because Chris Carter just doesn’t know how to write that. She has to learn it through an informant, as always. Who could that informant be? It would have to be someone close to Cancer Man, but also close to our duo. Diana Fowley! Of course! Just like in “Two Fathers” and “One Son!” Oh, that was genius! I’ll just do that ag–oh, wait. Diana Fowley’s dead. Hm. I know! I’ll use Monica! She’s a brunette too!

That is what happened. That man just substituted one dark-haired actress for another. Chris Carter needed one of Cancer Man’s intimates to deliver a crucial piece of information to Scully, and Diana Fowley was unavailable. That is what Monica’s character was sacrificed for.  He burned a character he spent two years developing because he needed to do two minutes of conspiracy exposition and he can ONLY DO IT WITH INFORMANTS.

And speaking of substitution…no. No, I can’t with Miller and Einstein. That will have to wait for another day. For now, let me say that “My Struggle II” becomes more depressing as I think more about it, because it suggests that in some sense, Chris Carter’s conception of The X-Files was always fundamentally conservative. So much fear of the new; so much resistance to change. Maybe that wasn’t always what it was all about for him; but it seems that, for him, that’s all that’s left: the musings of a madman who is still fighting the future. 


End file.
